Memories.
Ones that hadn’t been meant to resurface. I had blocked them out, pushed them down into the dungeon of my mind. Thinking they were something else, something dark and forbidden.
I let them free now and they hit me all at once—
Not only a memory, but a flood of them.
The night around me swarmed into fragments of another life. The smell of blood became lilacs, the air shimmered, bending, and when I blinked, I wasn’t standing in Nyctom’s collapse anymore. I was standing in its glory.
I was small, running barefoot across the courtyard of the palace. Laughter chased me through moonlit halls. Someone, a woman, was calling my name, her voice bright and soft like sunlight breaking through leaves. I turned toward her, but the image blurred, her face shifting in and out of focus, as if memory itself couldn’t decide whether to keep her.
Then everything stilled, shifting into a different room. Dimmer. Older. The air dense with incense and fear.
I was older now, no longer a child, but grown. My legs hung off the edge of a stone seat as someone stood before me, speaking close to my face. The words warped, as if carried underwater.
“You don’t have to do this. Please, please...don’t do this”
The voice was deep, frayed with pleading. A man’s, maybe.
And mine, my own voice, higher, steady in a way that broke me now, answered,“I must.”
The world around us flickered like a candle before it shudders out. Then came the hand, warm, calloused, wrapping around my neck, a forehead pressing to mine.“Then we’ll find our way back to one another. In every lifetime.”
Another nod and a different hand touched me, this one pushing its palm into that same spot against my head. There was a hum, a tug behind my eyes, before it honed. Pressure built behind my temples, a knotting, blinding squeeze that tore through me as it stole and stole.
I tried to scream, but the sound died before it left my throat. The light burned, erasing. One by one, the faces vanished. The voice. The room. The name I’d carried.
Then I was in a forest, where the scent of pine and cold air wrapped me in its embrace while a figure led me by the hand through the trees.
I wasn’t a baby. Not even a child. I could walk, I could think. But my head felt…stripped, drained. Like something had been scooped out and left to assume. I looked up at the figure, his silhouette framed by the dying light.
Callum.
The memory snapped in half, like a thread pulled too tight. I gasped, the vision shattering, the present crashing back into me—the taste of iron in my mouth, the sound of my own pulse thundering in my ears. He hadn’t found me in those woods. He’dtakenme there.
Blood soaked through as I knelt beside Wells’ body, his skin already stiff, the blue of his veins dimming to grey. Anger rose like pressure. A hunger pressing from the inside, filling every desolate space left by grief.
Across the hall, Killian and Elysian had their blades buried in the necks of the remaining soldiers. They cursed, spitting toward me from behind their fallen king. I didn’t even glance at them as a pulse of power refilled, enough to slip free from my fingers as they collapsed as one.
“You knew,” I said, breath trembling. “All this time,” my eyes found Callum, “you knew who I was.”
“Verena.” My name came broken off his tongue. “Let me explain. Please—” He inched forward.
I looked at him through the blur in my vision. “Who are you?”
He pressed a fist to his chest, like it meant something. “I’m still me.”
A fake laugh slipped from me. “No. You’re not.”
Because it wasn’t him, not the boy who’d held my hand when the night terrors came, who taught me to steady my breath and fight back. That Callum had died long before I ever learned my own name. The one standing before me now…he was built from secrets. From the lie they’d all sworn to keep.
Protect her. But never tell her why.
The knowledge sat in his eyes now, gleaming like the blade in my back. “Who holds them?” I asked. “My memories.”
He didn’t flinch, didn’t look away. “I do.”
“And if you die?”
